The talk uses Kara Walker’s 2014 installation “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” to delve into the different representational politics surrounding race and sexuality. In contrast to sexuality, race is often framed as visually knowable, but this means that we are left to grapple with distinct epistemological approaches toward violence, vulnerability, and pleasure. In order to make sense of the incommensurate, the talk offers brown jouissance and the process of molecularization as an analytic that centers oscillations between object/self/Thing and sensation as a mode of reading the aesthetic.